Exhortation and Sympathy in the Paul's Cross Jeremiads

This article considers affective rhetoric by examining the idea of exhortation. Appealing to the emotions in sacred rhetoric was not a strategy opposed to reasoned argument (as it often figures in secular rhetoric); rather, feelings of love for God and sympathy for one's fellow Christians were among the virtues that preachers sought to rouse in their hearers. Nor were the emotions and the reason rigidly separated in homiletic theories; the preacher persuaded through argument, rhetorical figures and the vehemence that his own spiritual conviction created. These links between argument, example and affection in persuasion are best demonstrated in the exhortation, which uses all the resources that the preacher had at his disposal to move his hearers towards godliness. One of the most significant means of persuasion was for the preacher to create a sympathetic bond between himself and the hearers. He addressed them as thinking and feeling members of a Church in which they all shared an interest. This aspect of affective rhetoric is best seen in the Paul's Cross Jeremiads, a sermon genre particularly associated with exhortation and characterised by vehement appeals to a sense of common purpose.